This portfolio explores the albums Vulfpeck, their members and collaborators. Vulfpeck’s Joe Dart is praised as one of the best bassists to emerge in recent years, but that’s not the only reason for this choice. Firstly, Vulfpeck is known for their one-take style of recording and off-beat musical style. Secondly, the band has a few closely associated members that appear on a large section of their music. Finally, the band’s members have their own solo projects which often still feature each other. This allows us to compare the albums of these artists and see what makes their music unique.

The natural groups in the corpus are as follows. Vulfpeck, Theo Katzmann, Woody Goss, Cory Wong, The Fearless Flyers and Nate Smith. Each of these categories consists of at least 3 albums and almost all albums feature the other artists. Though they share a band there are some clear differences in genre, Vulfpeck is primarily funk, Theo Katzman is more slow love songs, Cory Wong has the danceability of pop music, Woody Goss is minimalistic and has a more straight feel, The Fearless Flyers is extremely high energy and fast paced and Nate Smith’s solo work is odd-timed and syncopated heavy drumming.

Typical tracks for Vulfpeck are Cory Wong (yes that song is named after another artist in the list, it’s going to be confusing data!) or It Gets Funkier, the latter having the typical funk structure and interaction between instruments. An atypical song would be Theo Katzman’s As the Romans do. Whereas his solo music often has a halftime feel soulful style, this is an up-tempo track, more like what I would personally expect to come from Cory Wong’s repertoire.

It will be interesting to find out what makes each artists music truly theirs, even though they are so closely related and collaborative.